Exhibitions

TAKE REFUGE

COOP Gallery / 507 Hagan St. October 5, 2019 - October 26, 2019

Beizar Aradini, Nuveen Bawari, Aram Han Sifuentes, and Tshab Her

COOP is pleased to present TAKE REFUGE, a group exhibition featuring the works of Beizar Aradini, Nuveen Bawari, Aram Han Sifuentes, and Tshab Her.

Come, relax, you are welcome here. There are some things that you should know about this place, but please, we will make space. TAKE REFUGE is a reminder for the stakes of our humanity, a call for compassion, and a primer on how to “we”. Amid ongoing anxieties of belonging and citizenship, reinvigorated in part by escalating policies of exclusion, immigrants and refugees are constantly navigating where and how they can feel safe in the spaces that proclaim histories of inclusion. To take refuge is to take sanctuary – to be safe in an environment of constant instability, but it also gestures to the labor of care work that women do in order to offer comfort. In gesturing to acts of “we”-ing, of being together and of making room for each other, the works on view feature four women diasporic artists of immigrant and refugee backgrounds that navigate these questions of belonging. Working with textiles as conceptual and material orientations, the works by Beizar Aradini, Nuveen Bawari, Aram Han Sifuentes, and Tshab Her reflect on what it means being here and what its like to be enfolded into the conversations to we.